Do the alligators know that? Do male alligators wait till April 11th and think, "Finally, now I can get some sweet scaly lovin' "

In his book The Alligator's Life History, E.A. McIlhenny* wrote that he had never known an alligator to mate before April 10. This became an inside joke at the national park where I used to work (my doing) and reached the point that one year the rangers wore "Alligator Mating Season Begins TODAY!" stickers on their uniforms.

Alligators are among the smartest reptiles on the planet, which makes them only slightly stupider than that stuff stuck to the bottom of your shoe, but they can't read nor do they really give a hoot what humans thinks about anything anyway. I am sure that when the combination of weather and hormones sets off the "Get it on!" alarm in the gator's tiny brain, consideration of the date goes right out the window.

*Edward Avery McIlhenny was a member of the family whose company still produces Tabasco sauce on Avery Island in Louisiana. Prior to becoming CEO of that company, E.A. was a state game warden, turned Avery Island into a wildlife refuge, wrote the first real scientific work on the American alligator, and is credited with killing the largest alligator ever measured (19' 2"), although there is some debate as to the accuracy of his measuring. Being a fairly typical Victorian/Edwardian scientist, he tended towards the quantification of everything, hence the assignment of an actual date to the beginning of mating season.

LT

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If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha’ bought it fair!